The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [157]
Emily had switched off her flashlight and now held it against her thigh like a club. She pressed herself flat against the kitchen wall beside the pantry and waited for her eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. She held her breath and listened, trying to hear or feel movement anywhere in the house, but heard and felt nothing. When she could make out the details of the kitchen more exactly, she gazed at the counter with the wooden block with the knives. She couldn’t tell if they all were there, but she saw at least three long handles, and so she knew the most dangerous ones were still in place. She moved quietly across the kitchen and pulled out the carving knife. Then she paused once more, waiting. Above her she thought she heard the groan of the trapdoor to the attic—a prolonged creaking that accompanied the descent of the stairs—but she wasn’t sure. It might simply have been the house shuddering in the wind. She considered taking her knife and going straight up the stairs and challenging whoever was there—assuming someone had indeed just opened the door to the attic—but even if she made it to the second-floor landing without being heard, she would lose all surprise when she ran down the corridor toward the trapdoor. She needed another approach.
And the answer, she realized, was that bizarre back stairway at the other end of the kitchen. She almost never used it. She had ascended it exactly two times since they had moved in—the second time only because Chip wanted to show her how he’d replaced the worst of the steps—but it was still windowless, unlit, and too thin to be of practical use if you were carrying anything of any size. It still felt half-finished. But now it might offer the element of surprise, and so silently she opened the door and started up those steps, the flashlight in her left hand and the carving knife in her right.
The primary impact rarely kills everyone in a plane crash. This is especially true in the case of a planned water ditching. Reseda recalled Chip telling her in a voice that was almost numbingly clinical that underwater disorientation, drowning, disorderly evacuation, and injuries from not bracing properly were what killed many people, and Flight 1611 was tragically typical in that regard. Moreover, he feared it was likely that some passengers had an unreasonable faith that they would walk away from the disaster as easily as had the passengers on Flight 1549, Sully Sullenberger’s successful ditching of an Airbus in the Hudson River, and those individuals may not even have braced properly. They had, he presumed, been staring enrapt out the windows, as if this were a mere carnival ride.
He had no idea whether Ashley Stearns had braced properly, he said, but it probably wouldn’t have mattered: If Sandra Durant was one of those who did not die on primary impact, then Ashley was one of those who did. Compared to Sandra, she was fortunate, in that her death was almost instant. From what Reseda could see in Chip’s mind and from what he had told her of his encounters with the child, the girl had been all but cut in half—imagine a guillotine blade slicing through the abdomen—by a part of the aircraft when it finished its somersault and slammed upside down into the lake. Based on the airline’s colors and the portion of logo Chip could see on the metal, he had presumed it was either a part of the rear fuselage or a piece of the vertical stabilizer. There was so much more that he could have told her, but he didn’t. He didn’t have to. He didn’t have to tell her